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Kenneth Koch, 77, Poet of New York School

Kenneth Koch, a poet of the New York School whose work combined the sardonic wit of a borscht-belt comic, the erotic whimsy of a Surrealist painter and the gritty wisdom of a scared young soldier, died yesterday after a long battle with leukemia at his home in Manhattan. He was 77.

Mr. Koch's literary career spanned more than 50 years and resulted in the publication of at least 30 volumes of poetry and plays whose linguistic exuberance and experimental zest were bested only by their omnivorous subject matter. He wrote elegies, parodies, Dadaist dramas and fragmented shards of loosely structured verse on a palette of topics that ranged from his father's furniture business in southern Ohio to Japanese baseball stars to the pleasures of eating lunch.

Mr. Koch (pronounced coke) was considered a founding member of the New York School, an avant-garde poetic movement that was forged in the Manhattan of the 1950's when the beer at the Cedar Tavern flowed as smoothly as the passionate talk about Abstract Expressionist art. He and his contemporaries -- the poets, John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, and the painters, Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers -- took up the brash, anti-establishment mantle of their beatnik predecessors, but with a more classically European touch and with less machismo and facial hair.

Later in life, Mr. Koch became well known as a professor of poetry, mainly at Columbia University, where he lectured on literature and inspired budding writers for nearly 40 years. He was a spontaneous, high-octane teacher who was not above leaping on to desks to prove a point and who, for many years, taught writing to grade-school children, claiming that poetry was as thrilling as stickball.

Kenneth Jay Koch was born Feb. 27, 1925 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Stuart Koch, who owned a furniture store, and Lillian Koch, who wrote amateur literary reviews. After graduating high school, he served in the Philippines during World War II, a harrowing experience that he did not translate into verse until the very end of his life.

When the war ended, Mr. Koch enrolled at Harvard. He studied writing with the poet Delmore Schwartz and embarked on a lifelong friendship with Mr. Ashbery. By his own account, he was hungry for the poet's life but naïve about the art of making poems. ''I was so dumb I thought Yeats was pronounced Yeets,'' he said in an interview in 1977.

''I think we may have been more conscious than many poets of the surface of the poem, and what was going on while we were writing and how we were using words,'' he said of the New York School in the same interview. ''I don't think we saw any reason to resist humor in our poems.''

Indeed, Mr. Koch's poetry is at once lyrical and humorous, aching with emotion and achingly funny. He managed to write verse that is breathy and expansive in tone, yet still rooted in the American predilections for pop culture references and proper nouns.

In a way that makes one wish to open the windows and scream ''Hi!'' to the heavens,

And ''Oh, come and take me away before I die in a minute!''

''His great ability as a poet was to combine modernism and lyricism and to write poems that gave you a feeling as joyous as Whitman,'' said Ron Padgett, a former student of Mr. Koch's and a poet himself.

Speaking of Mr. Koch's long poem, ''The Duplications,'' one reviewer said it read like a collaboration between Lord Byron, Walt Disney, Frank Buck and Andre Breton.

Collaboration was, in fact, a crucial part of Mr. Koch's art. He and Mr. Rivers, for instance, worked together on a series of painting-poems called ''New York, 1950-1960'' and ''Post Cards.'' He also wrote the librettos to operas set to music by, among others, the composer Ned Rorem.

Mr. Koch once told an interviewer that, as a child, he kept a little orange book named the ''Scribble-in Book,'' which he filled with his sketches and musings. In high school, he set out to write what he called ''obscene and angry'' poems, which he showed to his junior-year English teacher, Katherine Lappa. Although he thought the verses would horrify Ms. Lappa, she told Mr. Koch -- at least, as he recalled it -- ''That's exactly the way you should be feeling when you're 17 years old.''

This fall, two of his books will be issued posthumously -- one contains many of his previously unpublished poems from the early 1950's, and the other is a gathering of new works. His most recent book was ''New Addresses,'' a collection of apostrophes to abstract ideas like World War II and Judaism.

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and won several prizes over the course of his career, including the Bollingen Prize in 1995 and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry in 1996. He was awarded three Fulbright scholarships and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

He is survived by his wife, Karen Koch; his daughter, Katherine Koch; and a grandson, Jesse Statman.

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A version of this obituary; biography appears in print on July 7, 2002, on Page 1001024 of the National edition with the headline: Kenneth Koch, 77, Poet of New York School. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe